The Children's Forest (A Short Story)

     It was in a time long, long ago. It may have been centuries or it may merely have been decades, I’m not sure which, that my story takes place.  It’s a story different from many, in that it's mainly a tale of trees and one little girl.  It’s a story of a pretty little forest, located at the epicenter of nowhere in particular. I call it the Children’s Forest.

     Trees of every sort, shape, and color filled this forest. There were tall firs, strong ponderosa pines, richly colored spruce, and knotty aspen. There were shorter, pudgier willows, sugar maples, and red maples.  They all worked together to create a world of vibrant color.  During the fall, the forest was a mix of intense autumn colors.  Just near the southwest corner of this sweet little forest lay a slough; McWenneger Slough to name it outright, but that doesn’t really come into my story.  And, placed closely near the middle, was Wren Cottage. 

      Some trees grew tall enough to barely touch the soft blue hem of the sky, while others were round, short, and shade giving.  Then there was me.  I couldn’t provide a leafy coverlet of shade, and neither could I reach my needles out to finger the hem of the sky.  I was, and I still am, a pine, but my trunk has a large curve at its base that keeps me from reaching the sky.  I am sure you are thinking what a terrible misfortune that it must be.  But, in truth I like my curve.  You will see I like it very much.  Now, I can only imagine you are wondering, how that, if I was there, I don’t remember when my story takes place.  You see, now I am old.  My branches have endured many ages of blizzards, cold, biting winds, and crispy frosts.  My roots have thirsted during a few hot and stinging summer droughts.  And my heart has suffered much heartache, left me by light-hearted children who grew up and became serious adults.  Perhaps, adults where you are from don’t grow unimaginative.  If indeed that is true, a powerful wonderful thing it is.  But, where I am, it is quite the other way.

     I’ve survived all trials thus far, but pieces of my heart and memory have died at having to watch and befriend those children who inevitably become grown-ups.  I’ve loved them all.  I have loved them even when they did not know I was capable of such things.  I remember all the greatest stories that I have been a part of.  My problem is that I don’t remember when they happened.  Maybe in telling the best story of them all, exactly how it was, maybe, just maybe, a piece of my heart, long dormant, will revive along with the spring blossoms of the apple trees.  And so, I begin.

     Most children, over the years, have loved my curve, and each for different reasons.  For that reason I have grown to love it, too.

      Elizavetta loved to sit on my “lap” while she dreamed of running through lavender fields, surrounded by mountains magenta with the alpinglow.  She would tell me how she wished she owned her very own skirt that flowed; one with white daisy fabric for the skirt and a simple pale blue bodice.  How she delighted in the thought of singing like Maria Von Trap on the mountain tops!  Only she didn’t wish to dress like a nun.  Elizavetta held a charm of beauty, that I have never seen quite the like of in any other child.   

      Then there was Cedric, a charming five year old, with childhood fantasies of flying to the moon…all on his own.  He was small for his age, and had to use every ounce of his “super” muscle to pull his chubby little body onto my curvy ledge.  Once he was up he would spread his legs out, just a little, lift his arms like he was about to pronounce a blessing on the pine-needle covered carpet of the forest, and leap through air.  He never managed a jump large enough to land him on the moon.  It was usually only a foot and a half out, but by the look in his ecstatic brown eyes, you would think he had at least hit the troposphere. 

     Basil, much preferred climbing my trunk to any other activity.  If he wasn’t completing his homework he was sure to be found in either my branches or the boughs of some other friendly tree.  Time and time again I heard his mother call, “Baaaaasiiiiil.  Basil, where are you?  Basil?  BASIL! Come in here right now, you haven’t finished your times tables.”  To which he would always reply, if he replied at all, “Aww, mom.  What’s the use?  I get them all wrong anyway.” 

     I wasn’t always the main attraction.  Often, I was quite the opposite.  But I still loved to watch the playful or thoughtful antics of the children’s lives.  Often times, during recess, Laura and Thomas would gather David, Ben, and Luke, from down the road, to play “Indians”.  They would gather their oldest looking wool coats and blankets to help protect them against the coming “bitter blizzard”.  Sometimes, they would write out a play and on a few occasions they would gather their parents and other friends to watch. 

     One tree, a ways from my location in the forest, had beautiful, healthy green branches that hung down to the ground creating a small canopy underneath.  Laura and Thomas’ mother would often read children’s books to them along with David, Ben, and Luke, underneath this canopy.  The children’s favorite was a story of a silly, old bear, named Pooh.  I am sure you have heard of Pooh and his best friend Christopher Robin.  If you haven’t then I shall be quite speechless, I am sure.  The children’s canopy soon came to be lovingly called “The Hundred Acre Wood”, and I’ve never heard it called anything contrary since. 

      How I loved these children.  How they made my heart dance.  Trees have always been known to love children, and I was not an exception. 

     Many winters came and went.  The aspens would turn yellow with every fall, and again turn springy green when winter melted away.  The summers grew hot, and then they to were gone.  Every year each child grew older, more docile and less imaginative, like their parents.  Oh, how my cambium layered heart longed that they wouldn’t lose their sweet, envisioning spirits.  Oh, that they would always be “Indians”, papoose-dolls in hand, fleeing the coming “soldiers”, tripping over protruding roots.  But, alas, it seemed this was impossible. 

     It was not long before Elizavetta’s family moved to a nearby city.  She never came to tell me about lavender fields or alpinglowing mountains again. She came back to visit only once, and even then, it was not I who she sought.  I am sure she barely knew I was there.  Her chestnut brown hair wasn’t hanging at her shoulders in curls, as I had always see it, but wound in a very elegant, ladylike, and painstakingly sophisticated bun.  I dripped a tear of warm, sorrowful sap as she left.

     Carefree, little Cedric was soon seven, and then, he was ten.  He was fifteen before I hardly noticed.  He had grown into a tall, strong teen, and no longer had any trouble climbing on top of me.  With one step, he could smoothly hoist himself up.  But, now that so little effort was needed, his dream of flying to the moon had been eradicated.  Soon he was a full fledged adult, and I never again assisted him in fingering the troposphere. 

     Basil grew just as quickly, but somehow, he enjoyed my company much longer than any of the rest.  He never grew to like his multiplication tables, and I’m sure he swore an oath of revenge upon division.  He never lost his love of climbing.  Not so long as I knew him anyway.  I find some comfort in that he didn’t grow too serious before he left the small cottage in the Children’s Forest. 

     Slowly, I grew resentful.  My heart, leastways parts of it, was dying.  All the children had left, and I strongly disliked the idea of more coming.  My heart had been broken too many times.  I had loved in too many ways.  I was growing cold.  And a terrible sight it was.

     But then, one day, a flame of hope flickered.  Here is where the most dear part begins.

     It was the chilly evening of Thanksgiving Day and the first day of snow that year.  The ground was covered in a three-fourths inch of snow.  Wren Cottage looked sublime, with the warm-yellow light flowing out the windows.  My heart was nearly deceived into thinking it was the times of old. 

     Wren cottage had welcomed a new family that day.  It was a small family with only one little girl.  Her name was Sybil…Sybil Breckenridge.  Part of me wanted to shun this little girl, but a larger part of me hoped that maybe this child would be different.  “Maybe”, I whispered.  “Maybe, she will be different.  Perhaps she will stay young forever.” I never really believed myself, but perhaps I ought to have.  At least a little.

     Sybil was different.  Her hair was as black as obsidian and nearly as glossy.  It flowed to her waist without so much as the slightest wave, and softly came to an end, not abruptly.  Her eyes, cropped with the longest and blackest lashes ever seen, were a dark hue of brown, so dark that unless you stood a few feet from her they appeared as black as a cloudless and starry midnight.  Her olive colored face was sweet, soft and rosy.  Her nose was small, but not too small.  However, it was her smile that captivated me most.  Her dusty mauve colored lips were rarely closed and limp, but seemed always to be pulled taught in a delicate, slightly crooked, but enthralling smile.  She was a beautiful child.  Sybil was lovely, but it wasn’t her looks that were different about her.  It was what she did and how she grew up that contrasted so much from the others.

     She was rarely bored.  Of course there were times, like all humans have (I’ve never heard tell of any such thing among trees), in which no matter how many amusements were available, nothing sounded remotely pleasurable.  She did suffer from those strange times of incurable boredom in which the lack of activities is not the problem, but the lack of will to do them.  As Leo Tolstoy says, “Boredom: the desire for desires”.  All people suffer from this, and, in that respect, Sybil was no different.  However, this phenomenon was rare in her life.  She had too many fascinations for there to be a hole of apathy in her life.

     She loved flowers.  I never new anybody who loved flowers as much as she.  It had not been long after the spring of her first year in the Children’s Forest, when she was still the warmhearted age of seven, that she had turned the perimeter of Wren Cottage into a flower bed with a dazzling mix of color.  As the years played on, those beds became most gorgeous.  She planted hollyhocks and honeysuckle vines in the rear along the base of the cottage, with roses, lilies, peonies, bleeding hearts, dahlias, and ferns in the foreground.  Hanging baskets filled with petunias, pansies, and fuchsias hung from the eaves.  And, she planted a row of lilacs in the open sunshine of the meadow.  You could smell the lilac fragrance throughout the whole wood.  Sybil always had some variety of wildflower wound in her hair, and rarely were there not some in her hands as well. 

     She was always reading. Always. I never saw her room, but I am sure it had little space that was not occupied by books.  If there weren’t flowers in her hands there were books, and often there were both.  Her favorite place to read was the Hundred Acre Wood.  My heart yearned to roll into a ball and accompany her there.  But, alas, condensing into balls isn’t something trees are good at.  She would often grab a blanket and read near my trunk.  I loved that best.  Sometimes she would read to herself, but most of the time she delighted me with reading out loud.  I almost fell asleep to the sound of her voice several times. 

     One time her mother even allowed her to pile the cave high with blankets; soft blankets, heavy blankets, and little blankets.  She made a bed fit for a queen and spent a starry night with only tree boughs for a roof.

     She was a poetic girl.  By poetic girl I mean she seemed to be a living, breathing poem.  Not a rhyming poem.  Not a largely understandable poem; simply, a grouping of related words that flowed like poetry.  I never could understand why she didn’t like poetry.  Oh, she had “versification” spells that left her dancing through the woods quoting Robert Lewis Stevenson, or as she grew older, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, or Longfellow, but she wasn’t the kind that was instantly won over with it, and she couldn’t soak it up like a sponge.  Nonetheless, she was poetry; pure and simple.

     The summer Sybil was nine the valley around Wren Cottage endured a sweltering drought.  The crops never came up, and the air choked the throats of every person in the vicinity.  The wild flowers that had poked their dainty faces through the dirt to see the sun were wilted and lying flat upon its surface.  The gardens were struggling.  However, due to manual watering, they were surviving.  And the hearts of all the citizens were hung low within their stature. 

     Our roots dug deep into the firmament; thus we were fine.  But, the tender heart of Sybil insisted on bringing buckets of cool, fresh water to relieve us of thirst.  She carried pail after heavy pail from the outdoor pump to the foundations of each tree.  Tipping the pail over, she would allow the refreshing water to drain into the soil.  She did this over and over for her favorites among us.  A silly idea? Perhaps.  A practical idea?  No.  An adoring motive?  Definitely. Whether it alleviated the drought any I doubt, but her kind purpose warmed the sap in us all. 

     To illustrate a picture of Sybil as a perfect child, different from all and delightful in every way, is not my wish.  You know as well as I, that no being of our earth is capable of being perfect.  Sybil was made of the same human fibers as you.  She had pitfalls, weaknesses, and annoyances.  I do.  You do. He does, and she does. We all do.  To write about hers would be risky. 

     In clarifying “risky”, I mean only that I lived outside…she lived inside.  I saw a few of her childish disobediences, but her mother corrected much more then I ever saw.  If I were to tell you of her flaws, I may, nay, I would most likely get them wrong.  For the shortcomings I detected might very well have been her strong points.  You never can tell by seeing only a few.  Of course there were the times she would sit on my lap and sob about…something.  I usually gathered it to be a tiresome chore she didn’t feel like doing, or because her mother had sent her out to play because she was grumpy.  Things like that.  It was always the small grumblings that spilled out; nothing large or preposterous.  And, for that reason I never learned what her true faults were. 

     All too soon, the years began to slip away again; first one, then two, then five…eight.  She was growing up.  With every passing day my tree stomach lurched.  You must be sure that if I had found it possible I would have stopped time. Stopped.  Time.  There.  I would not have let it continue.  But, alas, stopping time is in the control of one much mightier than me.  And, perhaps, that is providence.  She turned into a youth, but wasn’t following the pattern of solemnly morphing into unimaginativeness.  Sybil’s heart was as young, carefree, and kind as ever.  Her mind was maturing, but she was not losing her childlike love of life.    

     One day (I swear I fell asleep and woke up years later) she was 19.  She was home from college on Christmas break.  She had reached full height.  She wasn’t tall, not by a long, long shot.  She was short, but not so short that you perhaps would even notice.  She was perfectly short.  She had a head of delightful brains resting upon her shoulders.  It was filled with glorious literature, history, music, as well as less glorious, but still essential science and mathematics. The next three years of her college life, were lonely and uneventful times for me at home in the forest, and so I will not write of them.

     Then, joy of joy! College was over and Sybil was home.  But, even then time lingered for no one, least of all me. On the eve of Sybil’s twenty-fourth birthday her family all moved to town; away from Wren Cottage of the Children’s Forest.  My needles felt like a sickly yellowy-orange. Oh, despair of despair!

 

     But not all was as bleak as I thought.  No less than three months later Sybil moved back.  She was no longer Sybil Breckenridge, but Sybil Breckenridge-Carnlin.  The wedding was held in the back acreage.  And, a more stunning wedding was never held.  It contained burnt oranges and deep purples.  The flowers were Sybil worthy.  And the dress, a soft cream color that complemented her cheeks marvelously.  I smiled.  I smiled throughout the entire day.

     For many years I stood contented.  Sybil raised a darling family of five children among us loyal friends of hers.  I shall not bore you with the detail. Much of it was simple occurrences that only I would understand or cherish.  I shall only mention that joy lived within the borders of my little land. If I close my eyes I swear I can nearly hear the SWOOSH! of time traveling at a dangerous pace, but for awhile I learned to accept it.  I learned to accept it until the day that it brought everything to a devastating, jerking stop.  My story died.  The love in my heart froze.  I was crushed.

      It was a bitter, cold day in December.  The snow had come that year, but melted off completely.  The earth’s crust was as hard as a loaf of baguette bread that a careless child forgot to cover up before replacing to the bread cupboard.  As one walked, the ground squeaked and crackled.  Sybil had gone to town with her youngest son, Felix.  I never was told the whole story; for no one ever told me everything like Mrs. Carnlin.  From the bits I gathered here and there, I pieced together that, a driver in the adjacent lane had swerved.  She had hit Sybil’s car squarely on the driver’s door.  From there I know nothing; nothing, except that my dear…my precious Sybil never touched her foot down on the pine needle floor of the Children’s Forest once more.  She never read me another story with her children.  She never sang to me again.  She was a young thing, still much too young to pass.

     A bitter taste settled in my leaves.  Hot and sunny summer days seemed as dark and cold as February nights.  My one true, always faithful friend, was no more.

     And there, my story ends.  A sad tale to be true.  But I never told you it would end with a merry feeling of warmth in your chest.  Though I wish I could have, I did not.